How to Eat Sunflower Buds as Artichoke Hearts

Artichokes are great to eat, especially artichoke hearts. But artichokes don't grow easily everywhere. Even here at Haphazard Homestead, where they pretty much take care of themselves, the artichoke season can be short. In this video, I show how to get all the artichoke hearts you want -- by growing sunflowers. Yes, sunflowers! This works whether you grow Giant Sunflowers, fancy sunflowers, or black oil sunflowers. Here's how:

Step 1: Just go out to your sunflower patch and look for flower buds, and pull them off! I know, it seems so wrong to pull the head off a sunflower. But they are easy to grow and you can plant a lot of them. Or use a variety that produces lots of flowers instead of one big head.

Step 2: Take the sunflower buds into the kitchen. Here you can see the range of maturity of the buds that work like artichoke hearts. The buds showing their flowers have a little bit of a pine flavor that the younger buds don't have. You can also see here how the buds already look a lot like artichoke hearts, without all the artichoke leaves around them. But it's amazing how similar they taste, too!

To cook the sunflower buds, just blanch them in boiling water for 3 minutes. Then drain. And then cook in a second pot of boiling water until they are tender. Buds this size were almost tender enough after the first 3 minutes, so it only took about 3 more minutes to get them completely tender -- where a knife foes through the bud really easily without much resistance.

Then, just like with an artichoke, let them cook or rinse them in cold water, until you can handle them easily. Now, just trim off the back of the bud and get the bigger green leaves off the bud, until it looks like an artichoke heart. For the trimming, sometimes I use a knife. On the smaller buds, I think kitchen scissors make the trimming a little easier. This looks messy, but trimming an artichoke is messy, too!

At this point, you can use the sunflower buds however you like to prepare artichoke hearts. I'm sure you can make something fancier than me! : )

So how do they taste? Well, the other day for dinner, I just sauteed them with some Walla Walla sweet onions from the garden, and here' how it went --- The sunflower buds are really good! They have a little smokiness. The bigger ones have a little piney flavor to them.

I hope you get a chance to try sunflower buds as a substitute for artichoke hearts. I think you'll be pretty happy with how good they are! If you save seeds from the sunflower heads that you don't pick and eat, then you can harvest a lot of sunflower buds the next year.

I'd like to know how you would prepare sunflower buds if you used them like artichoke hearts! I hope things are going well at your place. If you enjoyed this video, please feel free to share it.

My gardening playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEGN8kE_KnjC46uuOaLL…

My channel: Haphazard Homestead
youtube.com/channel/UCcZCvPPU9dgxD0yXrc9DaPA

Photo: Cooked artichoke heart by DocteurCosmos:
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cooked_artichok… Used under CC BY 3.0 Unported: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Music:
"Enchanted Valley" and "Monkeys Spinning Monkeys" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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